We are publishing a series of engaging Review and Perspective articles from established authors who are preeminent in their fields. Each article explores a story of progress in medicine over the past 200 years. These articles will appear every other week during 2012 and be collected here. Check the News & Events section of this site for announcements about upcoming articles.
Dr. Gawande’s article traces the history and progress of surgery over the past two centuries, a time in which the profession has evolved from rapid, rudimentary and often unsuccessful procedures to intricate microsurgery, bold reconstruction and transplantation and more.
Publication Date : April 19th 2012
Journals do not simply disseminate new knowledge about medical theory and practice. They also define the scope of medical concerns and articulate norms for physicians’ professional and social roles. The history of NEJM provides a window on the changing functions of journals and the medical profession.
Publication Date : April 5th 2012
See it, Fix it, Prevent it, Disseminate it. Although “diseases peculiar to children” had figured in Benjamin Rush’s lectures at the University of Pennsylvania since 1789, most physicians in the early 19th century did not recognize children as a distinct population with particular medical needs. The word “pediatrics” did not appear in NEJM until 1880. Dr. Hostetter marks four eras in pediatric medicine in the past 200 years: the recognition of children as a particular population benefitting from medical care, the rise of public health as remedy, the development of vaccines, and finally, the global era.
Publication Date : March 15th 2012
As the world struggles to emerge from an economic crisis, policymakers and the public have homed in on skyrocketing health care expenditures. What lessons, asks author Victor Fuchs, can be drawn from the evolution, since 1950, in sources of payment and objects of expenditures in health care?
Publication Date : March 1st 2012
People have suffered from “asthma” for millennia. To illustrate this change, Drs. Jeffrey Drazen and Erika von Mutius provide three fictional reports of consultations performed on essentially the same patient who suffers from what we now call asthma.
Publication Date : February 16th 2012
Dr. Robert Truog discusses the changing dynamics of different aspects of the doctor-patient relationship over 200 years:
“The relationship between patients and doctors is at the core of medical ethics, serving as an anchor for many of the most important debates in the field. Over the past several decades, this relationship has evolved along three interrelated axes — as it is defined in clinical care, research, and society.”
Publication Date : February 2nd 2012
During the past 200 years, our understanding of infectious diseases has radically evolved, from the identification of microbes, to defining their genetic structure, to the development of focused antimicrobial therapies, to the realization of vector biology. Drs. Fauci and Morens discuss how the challenges of infectious diseases are both the same and different today as they were 200 years ago.
Publication Date : January 5th 2012
In this review of heart disease, Elizabeth Nabel and Eugene Braunwald focus on two themes — coronary artery disease and myocardial infarction. They discuss how our understanding has evolved over the past two centuries and highlight important therapies that have led to improved survival.
Publication Date : January 5th 2012
This interactive timeline represents all the research and review articles and case reports published in the New England Journal of Medicine from 1812 to 2012. The expanding navigation panel at the top of the timeline is an overview of the 200 years, with articles color-coded by medical specialty. The user can select categories to display and can view the data as a percentage of articles or as the actual number of articles per year.
Publication Date : January 5th 2012
Allan Brandt provides a retrospective of the NEJM at 200.
“With this issue, the New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary. In January 1812, as the first issue came off the handset letterpress, few of its founders could have predicted such continuity and success. John Collins Warren, the renowned Boston surgeon, his colleague James Jackson, a founder of Massachusetts General Hospital, and the small group of distinguished colleagues who joined them in starting the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and the Collateral Branches of Science expressed modest and largely local aspirations for the enterprise. . . .”
Publication Date : January 5th 2012
An editorial from the editors of the NEJM, reflecting on the meaning of the 200th anniversary.